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OpenSQL Camp 2008 has come and gone, and hooray again for Baron who came up with the idea and made most of it happen (but let’s not forget Sheeri!) Events such as these are always educational, but the most interesting stuff happens outside of the organised sessions (and this being an un-conf, they weren’t that strictly planned anyway 😉

For me (Arjen) a major chunk of the exercise was acquiring jetlag there and back with no days to spare either side, but I feel it was well worth it. I spent most of the time listening and talking with people rather than coding. It was a great opportunity to catch up with Monty, the Percona crew (Baron, Peter, Vadim, Tom, and more – there’s so many of them now!), Brian, Stewart, Jay, Pat, Eric and other Drizzlers, Sheeri, active OurDelta people like Nick and Rob, ex-Brisbanite Ronald, and of course Jim who thought he might learn something in the MVCC session (no I’m not going to explain that joke!)

The Percona patches have moved to Launchpad, so from now on they’re being developed in plain sight, available earlier for peer review, and more easily integrated into OurDelta builds. Thanks Vadim for making that happen! An excellent example of the Open Source development model – the resulting quality will be even higher! The Percona crew is also working on their end of the 5.1 porting of the patches, with priority given to the performance-related ones. OurDelta contains additional patches and features, so we have extra work anyway – all help is great and much appreciated!

OurDelta is, as stated previously, committed to doing 5.1 builds also, but we’re going to continue doing 5.0 builds for the foreseeable future as well. Most deployments are currently on 5.0, and the various enhancements in OurDelta builds provide breathing space (in terms of performance, and monitoring/tuning instrumentation) while people check out 5.1 and plan for a possible upgrade. And we’ll make sure that anything we put in 5.0 will also be available in 5.1, so that you don’t lose anything when you do upgrade. That’s our promise.

We’re currently looking at a few more platforms to build for, such as Solaris and Windows. The latter is mainly aimed at developers, who will certainly appreciate the extra info they can get out of an OurDelta build and thus make better performing applications!

Next to performance-related patches, instrumentation is and will remain a key focus for OurDelta. We want to get even more information from the server (without increasing disk I/O, contention or CPU load and yes that is possible), as it offers more breadth and depth than any external solution. And we reckon -and that’s us who deal directly with real-world deployments on a daily basis- that is well worth the extra effort!